In the fields of dentistry, orthopedics and plastic surgery, various regeneration techniques are used for recovering lost bone tissue and a bone defect after treating tumor. The regeneration techniques include guided bone tissue regeneration using a bone graft material with various shapes and a barrier membrane, autogenous and allogeneic bone grafts, etc., and recently methods using various kinds of growth factors, protein, and the like are studied. The supply of xenogeneic bone and alloplastic bone, which are used as a bone graft material, has been dependent upon imports so far, but lately, domestically produced bone grafts are being marketed due to strengthening of domestic technologies. However, since the shape of a bone defect is irregular, a graft material, which can completely fill the bone defect, has not yet been developed. In addition, there was a limitation in that, when a biomaterial itself, such as a bone graft or a barrier membrane is used as a graft material, it may function as a carrier having bone conductivity, but it does not have osteoconductivity for initial osteogenesis, which is essential to shorten the treatment period, and thus osteogenesis can be induced after a considerable period of time after surgical operations.
In order to increase graft performance, physiologically active substances inducing chemotaxis, for example, extracellular matrix proteins, tissue growth factors, or bone morphogenetic proteins, have been experimentally used to provide rapid osteogenesis, but the use of such proteins has problems in that the proteins are relatively expensive, cause immune responses or have a short in vivo half-life. Also since the proteins are exposed to systemic blood flow when applied in vivo, such that it is difficult to maintain their effective concentrations at local sites, they must be administered with high dosage for maintaining their effective concentrations in vivo, which caused concerns raised over side effects due to high dose administration. For these reasons, a novel technology capable of overcoming such problems is required.
As the only bone tissue regeneration-inducing material currently marketed, there is Emdogain (Straumann), and it consists of enamel matrix derivative, especially amelogenin to induce natural growth of teeth, thus inhibiting epithelial tissue formation in a defect and forming a novel alveolar bone and cementum. However, amelogenin is a protein so it dissolves at room temperature, and at present, it is extracted from developing tooth germs of 6-month-old porcine fetuses and thus there is a possibility of inducing immune responses when it is applied to humans, the production efficiency is low, and the cost is high.
Accordingly, the present inventors have made extensive efforts to solve the above-described problems occurring in the prior art and, as a result, have developed an injectable bone regeneration material containing a bone formation enhancing peptide derived from extracellular matrix and confirmed that it has the ability to differentiate into bone tissue and bone-regenerating ability in a bone defect, thereby completing the present invention.